Wednesday, 14 January 2015

That awkward moment when the person you're talking to online tells you Louis XIII is her boyfriend. Yes, *that* Louis XIII

I lurk on various blogs. I seldom post, because that might result in me being drawn into a debate and I have a pathological aversion to anything that might conceivably be construed as confrontation, if you stand far enough away from it. In a bad light. While squinting.

A regular on one of these blogs refers to her boyfriend as Louis and her avatar is of a striking middle-aged man with hair (both head and facial) that does indeed make him look like Louis XIII. I assumed that the chap in the avatar was her boyfriend, that they shared an interest in Louis XIII and that they had a sort of role-play thing going whereby he styled himself (and, if the changing avatar pictures are anything to go by, sometimes dressed) like the Bourbon king. Eccentric, but cute.

Anyhoo...

The other day, in a conversation about books, one poster mentioned having enjoyed a series of supernatural romance novels. The regular poster commented that she had her partner were well into that. Supernatural romance fan (or "SRF' for short) asked, with some astonishment, if the regular and her other half had read the books in question, because they'd never met anyone else who had. (From this, you will gather that we're not talking about the Twilight series.) The regular replied that no, they hadn't, but that the two of them were fans of supernatural romance because her lover had crossed over some time ago. I felt saddened by this news and so, apparently, did SRF, who duly expressed condolences. The regular then explained that it was all right, her lover was Louis XIII, so he had died long before she was born.

At this point, SRF vanished from the conversation. Did they simply think, "I shall pursue this line of inquiry no further" or did they "nope" all the way to Antarctica? Who can tell?

As delusions go, this one is pretty harmless and seems to make the regular poster happy, so although I was a bit "Okaaaaaaaaaaaaay" about this revelation, it's not something that's going to keep me awake at night. (I hope you will forgive me for assuming that the relationship is imaginary and that she is not genuinely getting freaky with a dead French monarch. It just seems an awful lot more likely.)

However, I'm now left wondering about the man in her avatar pictures. I mean, unless photography was invented a lot earlier than I thought (or the regular poster has been time-travelling with a camera), he must have lived much more recently than the seventeenth century. So who is he? I'm reluctant to ask, because I rarely post on that forum and blundering in to put the question directly would be rather blunt. Or worse: it might lead to a debate, and we know how I feel about that. The thing is, his face is sort of familiar; I feel like I should recognise him.

Anyone know who it is? Stolen picture below. I apologise that it's so small - I can't find anything bigger. I realise that the head is almost certainly 'shopped onto the body, but the owner of the face must nevertheless have existed some time in the last century. I also realise that this picture was probably created by the regular poster and I feel a bit naughty using it here, but I can't think of a way of showing it to you without 'outing' the poster in question.